WAND Skills Taxonomy

WAND has been doing a lot of work in SharePoint 2010 since it launched providing taxonomies for the managed metadata service to help companies tag library items more effectively.  However, we noticed that managed metadata can also be used to help tag My Sites profiles so we created a skills taxonomy just for that purpose.

WAND Skills Taxonomy

The WAND Skills taxonomy has over 1400 different business and personal skills that can be used as a foundation for creating robust skills profiles for any business.

Helping your employees fill out a skills profile with a common set of skills across the organization can be extremely valuable for team building, sharing expertise, and finding the right combination of skills for projects.

WAND Skills Taxonomy 2

     If you are using My Sites without a skills taxonomy, you risk ending up with a mess.  One employee may tag himself as "Spanish Speaker" while another tags herself with "I know Spanish" and another may say "Hablo Espanol".    This lack of normalization severely limits the usefullness of these profiles.  

Here you can see how we have integrated the skills taxonomy into the SharePoint My Sites profile. When an employee begins to type in his or her skills, suggestions from the skills taxonomy will appear, allowing the employee to select from the common vocabulary that has been established.

WAND Skills Taxonomy in SharePoint My Sites Profile